The subject of magic at a Renaissance court most
readily evokes the Emperor Rudolph II in his castle
at Prague, absorbed in alchemy or astral studies,
endeavouring to communicate with spirits, and using
the arts as a medium for spiritual energies. But was
something comparable happening at the Stuart court?
In Vaughan Hart's estimation, there was a similar
fascination with the esoteric arts in England. The
particular kind of magic he associates with the
Whitehall world is essentially Neoplatonic, where by
means of "number, weight, measure, harmony,
motion and light," the Ideas or perfect forms of
the virtues may be conjured or expressed, and their
powers appropriated and used to noble ends by the
wise practitioners of the arts. The monarch,
characterised as king, philosopher and priest,
occupied a central position in this enterprise, while
around him the poets, painters, musicians and
architects of the court composed their harmonious,
well-proportioned works that would ensure a
propitious reign attuned to the Divine Will. The
masque, as a composite art-form patronised by the
monarch and directed to him, provided the principal
and recurring focus for these Neoplatonic exercises:
magic was often a feature of these productions, and
there was a notable fondness for Hermetic mythology
in their fables. Emblems, symbolic costumes, musical
motifs and hieroglyphic dances reinforced the
talismanic power of these court ceremonies, and the
stage architecture with its Vitruvian discipline,
itself a kind of frozen music, supplied a framework
of antique authority. Hart interprets the Stuart
masque in a much more insistently Hermetic way than
has previously been the case, representing it not as
theatre of illusion but as a glimpse of divine
reality attained in a transcendent moment of court
life.

The chief magus in this view of the Stuart court is
Inigo Jones, whose achievements and presumed
intentions form a continuous thread throughout the
book. Presented as the Stuart successor to John Dee,
he is offered to us here as a figure of considerable
philosophic profundity. We readily acknowledge him as
a Vitruvian polymath, but Hart makes a strong case
for Jones as a Hermeticist, an adept of the occult.
This opinion draws strength from a close scrutiny
both of Jones's marginalia, which indicate a
familiarity with significant Neoplatonic texts, and
of his architectural drawings which contain a
symbolic geometry associated with those texts.
Jones's only published statements about architecture
and its functions occur in his treatise on
Stonehenge, posthumously printed and not certainly of
his own composing. Hart provides plausible grounds
for accepting its authenticity, and uses it as a key
document for Jones's thinking about the mysteries of
his practice. By selective reasoning, the Stonehenge
geometry can be shown to have affinities with the
palace that Jones projected for Charles I at
Whitehall, and with the restored facade of St Paul's
that he undertook in the 1630s. Contemporary ideas
about the plan of Solomon's Temple may also have had
a bearing on Jones's designs for royal buildings.
Certain Stuart architectural schemes, in Hart's view,
were an aspect of the renewal of ancient Albion,
understood as a place of magical virtue, mystic
kingship and pure religion, and this restoration of a
specifically British golden age was also a recurring
theme in the masques and in the iconography
associated with James I and Charles I. Hart further
speculates that many of Jones's major designs were
intended to mark out a processional route from
Whitehall to St. Paul's appropriate to a dynasty of
Mercurian monarchs. Hart offers us a Neoplatonic idea
of the Stuart monarchy in its spiritual city that he
believes was shared by the poets, architects and
court panegyrists of the age, but in the absence of
programmatic documents or explicit statements, all is
conjectural. Much rare and unusual material is
explored in this ambitious enquiry, and though the
findings are sometimes too densely presented, they
are provocative and pleasing to the mind. Frances
Yates would have approved of this book.